Regular Expressions Cookbook

Organization of This Book

The first three chapters of this book cover useful tools and basic information that give you a basis for using regular expressions; each of the subsequent chapters presents a variety of regular expressions while investigating one area of text processing in depth.

Chapter 1, Introduction to Regular Expressions, explains the role of regular expressions and introduces a number of tools that will make it easier to learn, create, and debug them.

Chapter 2, Basic Regular Expression Skills, covers each element and feature of regular expressions, along with important guidelines for effective use.

Chapter 3, Programming with Regular Expressions, specifies coding techniques and includes code listings for using regular expressions in each of the programming languages covered by this book.

Chapter 4, Validation and Formatting, contains recipes for handling typical user input, such as dates, phone numbers, and postal codes in various countries.

Chapter 5, Words, Lines, and Special Characters, explores common text processing tasks, such as checking for lines that contain or fail to contain certain words.

Chapter 6, Numbers, shows how to detect integers, floating-point numbers, and several other formats for this kind of input.

Chapter 7, URLs, Paths, and Internet Addresses, shows you how to take apart and manipulate the strings commonly used on the Internet and Windows systems to find things.

Chapter 8, Markup and Data Interchange, covers the manipulation of HTML, XML, comma-separated ...